The privacy differential – why don’t more non-US and open source firms use the NSA as marketing collateral?

The shockwaves generated by Edward Snowden's revelations of the close collaboration between US tech giants such as Microsoft and Apple and the NSA are still reverberating through the industry. Those disclosures, together with related ones such as the involvement of the NSA in industrial espionage, as well as the asymmetric nature of US law when it comes to gathering data from foreign individuals, present something of an open goal for non-US technology companies - or so one might have thought.

On the face of it, then, it is surprising that non-US technology firms and others that can distance themselves from the US law are not proclaiming this fact more loudly. After all, there must be a considerable number of organisations that would dearly love to locate their data as far away from the attentions of the NSAas possible.

Perhaps the lack of fanfare is merely a reflection of the relative sizes of the marketing budgets available to the US tech giants and local contenders; or perhaps the shock of Snowden has yet to translate itself into meaningful action, making such messaging premature.

Can of worms?

Or maybe the alternatives to the US cloud giants are simply wary of making bold promises that may later come back to bite them. Analyst Clive Longbottom of Quocirca certainly believes that organisations need to be very careful about seeking to differentiate themselves from others on the basis of the leaks.

"In my view, trying to market off the back of Snowden would be opening a can of worms," Longbottom said. "To every possibly positive marketing message there will be a few sensible contradictions. 'Hey, we have no back doors on our system!' - bet you use equipment at the hardware level from vendors who Snowden implicated in such backdoors. 'Hey, we're open source, so it's all OK!' Sure - the NSA has never infiltrated any open source group and built in back doors through such means."

Despite the possible "worms", however, there are some companies thatare using the revelations to set themselves apart. One is security firm F-Secure, which is actively involved in promoting privacy via collaboration with pressure groups such asDon't Spy on Us and the Open Rights Group and which uses its very Finnish-ness as an asset.

"Finnish culture is very much about privacy. Freedom of speech is written into their constitution so the technology is built with the idea that people are anonymous and data is protected," said Allen Scott, F-Secure's managing director for UK and Ireland.

Scott acknowledged the dangers of over-promising on the issue, saying that any organisation promoting itself as ethical will become a target for attackers trying to prove it wrong.

"This is the sort of thing that has to be built into your company at an R&D level and a board level. If you're going to say that you're 100 per cent anything you're already open to ridicule. If you say the safest company in the world people try to hack you."

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The privacy differential - why don't more non-US and open source firms use the NSA as marketing collateral?